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Monday, June 22, 2015

The New Intolerance

Over at NRO, I consider the works of the 1960s academic Herbert Marcuse as anticipating the vicissitudes and inherent contradictions of the current PC culture war:

If the agents of the new intolerance ever get around to “deproblematizing,” as they would put it, Mount Rushmore, they might consider adding the visage of Herbert Marcuse to the crags of the Black Hills. Much of modern “political correctness” is really a New Left cultural politics that has made an uneasy peace with material prosperity. (The trajectory of Al Gore — from youthful critic of consumerism to gray-haired centimillionaire — is instructive here.) Marcuse’s work is much more sophisticated and rigorous than the tweets of many of today’s outrage activists, but that only makes it more important to engage with his ideas in order to comprehend the foundations of the Newer Left’s cultural crusade — and to see why this crusade fundamentally fails.